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Warning: This post contains spoilers for Cuckoo.
If it seems like something shady is going on at the remote Bavarian resort run by an excessively friendly bordering on cartoonishly villainous motel proprietor, there probably is. The importance of trusting your gut is one clear lesson at the heart of Neon’s latest horror offering, Cuckoo, in theaters Aug. 9.
As for what the shady thing actually is, that’s a little less straightforward.
Written and directed by German filmmaker Tilman Singer (Luz), Cuckoo follows 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), her father Luis (Márton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and younger half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), as they take up residence at a house in the German Alps while Luis and Beth design a new property for the aforementioned resort owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens). Gretchen has been unwillingly displaced from her home in America following her mother’s death, and feels like an interloper in her father’s second marriage. She even goes around telling people that Alma, who is mute, is not actually her sister.
But after she accepts an offer from Herr König to work at the front desk of the resort, Gretchen begins to encounter increasingly bizarre situations—from disoriented female guests vomiting in the motel’s lobby to a goggle-sporting, trench coat-wearing blonde woman (Kalin Morrow) chasing her down while she’s biking home one night. So when Alma starts experiencing strange seizures—and Herr König and his friend at the local hospital, Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), take an unusual interest in her—it becomes all too clear that something sinister is afoot.
What’s up with the end of Cuckoo?
As it turns out, Herr König is what he refers to as a “preservationist,” the head of a generations-spanning breeding program for…a species of superpowered female-presenting humanoids with the reproductive and parasitic behavioral habits of cuckoo birds? The goal of all this is never fully explained and much of the plot is…
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